Hi,

 

> The most important missing feature is having easy to use, embeddable, 
> micro-VMs. Microsoft .NET doesn't have this, but the Mono guys made 
> their own implementation of the CLR with this as a primary concern. 
> There are no legal or technical obstacles stopping this from happening 
> on the JVM side, it's just no one has done it. 
>

I guess the reason is that Microsoft hasn't sued anybody over their 
implementation.
The requirements, the wording and the experience around getting the TCK and 
being an "official Java" vs. having something like an "Android" status too 
scary for everybody.
Too much bureaucracy, too many worries about lawyer stuff.
 

> What else do we want from Java: the super IDEs and the build tools. As 
> I explained earlier, the Java build tools are really at the leading 
> edge of the industry. And almost every dev I know that has used it 
> would pick IntelliJ any day over Visual Studio. 
>
Calling Maven (and Ant) "leading edge of the industry", (which is what 
about 95% of the developers have to use) is not without irony.

The Java ecosystem is just a place where "the standard tool" is almost 
always preferred over "the best tool for the job".
With dogmatism replacing pragamtism over the last 10 years it is not 
surprising that many of the more progressive developers left 
Java-the-language or even Java-the-ecosystem.

Same thing with IDEs: It doesn't help to have superior tooling (IntelliJ or 
Gradle, SBT) when no one uses it.
With Eclipse being obviously optimized for rebranding by plugin providers 
instead of usability, Visual Studio the winner here.
 

> "But yes, at least unsigned integer math is coming in Java 8, afaik." 
>
> Where did you hear this? Do you have a link? I can't find this on 
> google. 
>

http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.openjdk.core-libs.devel/8937
http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~darcy/4504839.1/
 

> I think the most promising candidate is the forthcoming Kotlin. It 
> definitely 
> one ups Java/C# and doesn't require paradigm shifts and I'm hoping it 
> won't have the compilation speed penalty and runtime speed penalty 
> that Scala seems to have.  
> [...]
>  - Kotlin is a better, more exciting, and more elegant language than C#. 
>

I wonder where all this wishful thinking comes from. It is not like we 
couldn't actually check stuff instead of repeating the claims from the 
marketing slides.
Kotlin, Ceylon, Gosu - everything is available in one form or another.


My notes from last week:

*Kotlin: *

   - Very immature, but the browser applet/JavaScript thing is interesting.
   - Winner in the category "compiler crashes" with 3 crashes in 20 
   minutes. 
   - Syntax-wise almost identical to Scala and getting closer.
   - No mailing lists, not open source yet.
   - As far as I have understood, it targeted to be "just a language", 
   reusing the Java standard library.
   
*Ceylon:*

   - Surprisingly bad compiler error messages.
   - Nice website. Source available.
   - Winner in the category "ignoring every piece of language design 
   knowledge". Just read the mailing list. Very painful.
   - Also winner in the category "let's change every keyword just for the 
   sake of it".
   - Plans to completely replace the Java ecosystem with own 
   implementations.
   - Obscure type system research and changes even after "two years of 
   development", especially for a language trying to be "industrial".
   
* Gosu:*

   - Their "IDE" is very limited, primitive. Wondering why they feature 
   their Eclipse/IntelliJ not more prominently. Probably even more limited 
   than their own IDE...
   - Winner in the category "Obsolete when Java 8 arrives", but:
   - Interesting ideas (open type system), although I think F# type 
   providers are a more consistent approach.
   - The unfortunate compromises in language design give the language the 
   hackish feeling of Groovy.
   - Good documentation, but somehow I didn't find a link to the source 
   code, also no nightles.
   - Not much development going on at the moment.

All languages have two things in common:

   - They are OO/functional in the C#/Scala way
   - They promise reified Generics, but fail to deliver

Would be nice to get some other _constructive_ criticism instead about 
believing everything language creators say...


Bye,


Simon

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